Nike and Global Labour Practices
A case study prepared for the New Academy of Business Innovation Network for Socially Responsible Business by David F. Murphy & David Mathew

The strategic concept for Nike entering the new century is to be an archetype of the responsible 21st century global company, in the sense that we are providing a sustainable footprint everywhere, not only with environmental performance, but with people performance as well. The triple bottom line of people, planet and profit is our goal. Dusty Kidd, Vice President Corporate Responsibility, Nike Inc.

As we continue to engage in conversations and projects with NGOs around the world, one thing is certain: the better we become at outreach and communication, the more opportunity we’ll have to improve our labor practices. www.nikebiz.com

January 2001

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Nike and Global Labour Practices Introduction The following case study outlines Nike’s experience in developing and implementing various labour practice initiatives in its footwear and apparel factories worldwide. Initially written as a working draft by the New Academy of Business for the members of its Innovation Network for Socially Responsible Business1, the case study is based upon publicly-available material, information provided by Nike and interviews with selected Nike staff and external stakeholders. The working draft case formed the basis of a learning activity at a meeting of the Innovation Network in early 2000.2 Based upon feedback from Nike and Innovation Network members, the case study has been re-drafted. This revised case study also incorporates additional information gathered during a research visit to China and the Philippines later in 2000. The field research included visits to 3 Nike contract factories in China and 3 in the Philippines, as well as interviews with Nike staff and external stakeholders in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Manila. The case study is not an attempt to ‘put Nike on trial’, nor were the field research and factory visits monitoring or auditing exercises. As a business school case study, its main purpose is to offer company managers and business students with insights into why and how Nike has developed policies, procedures and partnerships to improve working conditions in the factories where its products are manufactured. Although Nike has provided feedback on drafts, ultimate responsibility for the content and any inaccuracies lie with the New Academy of Business and not Nike. The Power of the Swoosh The Nike ‘swoosh’ is one of the world’s best known corporate trademarks. Numerous sponsorship deals with major athletes from Michael Jordan (basketball) to Lindsay Davenport (tennis) to Tiger Woods (golf) have helped make Nike a leading brand of sports footwear and apparel worldwide. American Sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson capture the pervasive cultural and commercial influence of Nike: We live in a cultural economy of signs and Nike’s swoosh is currently the most recognizable brand icon in that economy. The Nike swoosh is a commercial symbol that has come to stand for athletic excellence, hip authenticity, and playful selfawareness. While the logo carries the weight of currency, Nike’s ‘Just do it’ slogan has become part of the language of everyday life.3 With echoes of ‘the Artist formerly known as Prince’, Nike’s 1997 annual report notes that the “company has come to be known by a symbol — the swoosh.” The power of the swoosh has also made Nike a major target of labour, human rights and consumer groups which are campaigning globally on working conditions in the apparel and footwear industries. Nike critic Naomi Klein calls the “international anti-Nike movement – the most publicized and tenacious of the brand-based campaigns.”4 While this has tarnished Nike’s reputation in recent years, the company’s appeal as a popular culture icon remains strong. Nike has even become the subject of graffiti humour as...

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...Nike and International LaborPracticesNike has long been known as the only brand of shoes to wear. Since its inception in the early 1970s, teenagers have seen the brand’s “swoosh” as a mark of cool. With their celebrity endorsements with people like Tiger Woods, kids have wanted the shoes so that they could be like their sports star. Nike was headed to the top rung of the athletic shoe industry until it hit trouble in the 1990s with news leaking out about labor violations in its factories overseas.
Executive Summary
Nike’s company strategy is a clever one. One that founder Phil Knight thought of while still in school at Stanford. Instead of paying Americans to put together Nike’s shoes, Knight thought that it would be a better idea to take manufacturing plants overseas to places where labor is much cheaper than in the U.S., places like Taiwan and South Korea. With 86% of its products being produced in one of those two countries and Nike employing a large number of people who lived there, the countries became richer and richer until Knight decided prices were too high to manufacture there anymore (Hitting the Wall, 3). He decided to move the factories to places in China like Indonesia where countries were practically begging for foreign investment. Production was going well until the early 1990s when labor strikes rose to 112 in 1991 and...

...Nike and Unfair LaborPractices
I. Introduction
Nike has been accused of the unfair laborpractice of sweatshop labor. A sweatshop is a place with hazardous working environments, extreme temperatures and abusive employers, hence the term sweat shop. Sweatshop workers work long days exceeding 14 hours and earn less than the living wage (Britanica, n.d.). While these conditions may be shocking to Americans and Modern Western Nations the notion of abusive working conditions is more attractive to Asians and South Americans who are faced with the stark choice of terrible working conditions or unemployment and possible death by starvation. The accusation then is that Nike is using these labor condition inequalities to take unethical advantage of the laborers. Of course, Nike, Inc. denes these allegations often hiding behind the claim that Nike has little control over the working conditions in the facilities of its subcontractors. After all, Nike will never admit that the Lebrons or Black Mambas they sell for a small fortune are made by sweatshop labor halfway across the world. This speech will talk about the problem presented by the unfair laborpractices of the Nike subcontractors and how it is against the teachings of the Church. The speech will...

...Morality, and Social Responsibility of Nike’s Overseas LaborPractices and Misleading Statements to the Media.
CERTIFICATION OF AUTHORSHIP:I certify that I am the author of this paper and that any assistance I received in its preparation is fully acknowledged and disclosed in the paper. I have also cited any sources from which I used data, ideas or words, either quoted directly or paraphrased. I also certify that this paper was prepared by me specifically for this course.
Student's Signature: Pete Saunders
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Instructor's Grade on Assignment:
Instructor's Comments:
Integrating Business Values: The Legality, Morality, and Social Responsibility of Nike’s Overseas LaborPractices and Misleading Statements to the Media
Pete A. J. Saunders
Hamilton, Bermuda
Abstract
Nike Inc., is one of the largest and most successful manufacturers of athletic apparel. The company’s successes were not without failure in handling important legal, ethical and societal issues. Nike was accused of unfair overseas laborpractices in its factories and for making misleading claims about its involvement. Nike’s unethical practices in these overseas territories were not illegal. In contrast, it was illegal when Nike used the media to make false statements...

...HITTING THE WALL: NIKE AND INTERNATIONAL
LABORPRACTICES
Synopsis of The Situation
Based in Beaverton, Oregon, Nike had been a corporate success story for more than three decades. It was a sneaker company, but one armed with an inimitable attitude, phenomenal growth, and the apparent ability to dictate fashion trends to some of the world’s most influential consumer. Selling a combination of basic footwear and street-smart athleticism, Nike pushed its revenues from a 1972 level of $62,000 to a starting $49 million in just 10 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, Nike had been plagued by a series of labor incidents and public relations nightmares; underage workers in Indonesian plants, allegations of coerced overtime in China, dangerous working conditions in Vietnam. For a while, the stories had been largely confined to labor circles and activist publications, until a young female worker had died in a Nike contracting factory in 1997, the labor conditions at Nike had hit the mainstream. While the marketing of Nike’s products was based on selling a high profile fashion item to affluent Americans, the manufacture of these sneakers was based as an arms-length and often-uneasy relationship with low paid, non-American workers.
Key Issues
Nike's strategy of shaving costs caused ethical dilemmas that ultimately...

...Hitting the Wall: Nike and International LaborPractice
BY SEASON
ISSUE DEFINITION
How do Nike do the international laborpractice effectly?
SITUATION ANALYSIS
In the mid-1990s Nike, one of the world's most successful footwear company, is hit by a spate of alarmingly bad publicity. After years of high-profile media attention as the company that can "just do it". Nike is suddenly being portrayed as a firm that relies on low-cost, exploited labor in its overseas plants. Nike officials vigorously deny the charges, claiming that Nike has no control over the independent contractors who manufacture Nike shoes. But the activists will not retreat. Eventually, Nike must learn to deal with the activists' claims and with the tangle of conflicting data that surrounds the concept of a "fair" or "living" wage.
Just like McDonald with its most recognized hamburger - a flat patty of ground meat, usually beef, that is broiled, grilled, or fried and usually served in a bun- is a symbol of American pride all around the world, Nike with its footwear, apparel and all other sport product embodied of swoosh logo is a symbol of American business success in sport, athletic and fashion industry. The company history recall that The Nike...

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History of NikeNike, who currently ranks as 136 in the fortune 500 for America’s largest corporations, has come a long way since its humble beginning of in the 1960’s. Founded by visionaries Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight who at the time had no clue how much of an impact this footwear would make in the marketing world. Bill Bowerman was a track and field coach at the University of Oregon with enormous amount of knowledge on athletics and was always looking to help his players maintain the advantage. “Bowerman's 24 years as coach at the University of Oregon, he developed many of the world's best distance and middle-distance runners, among them Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar. He won four National Collegiate Athletic Association track and field championships, and he coached 44 all-Americans and 19 Olympians.”(cite) .
Here’s a little bit about the history of Bowerman’s family. “William Jay Bowerman Jr., a descendant of pioneers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840's, was born in Portland and raised in Fossil, a town in eastern Oregon, and in Medford. He was a quarter-miler and a football blocking back at the University of Oregon and was accepted to medical school after graduating in 1934. But he became the track and football coach at Medford High School instead and, after serving as an Army officer in Italy during World War II, embarked on his collegiate coaching career.
In 1949, Bowerman became the track coach at Oregon, where Bill...

...Nike Case Analysis
Prepared for Consumer Behavior
Introduction
Nike is the largest seller of athletic footwear and athletic apparel in the world with subsidiaries in over 200 countries across the world. It is a company that was founded by Phil Knight in the 1960’s, who was a talented middle-distance runner from Portland. He approached the Onitsuka Co. in Kobe, Japan, and persuaded the manufacturer of Tiger shoes to make Knight a distributor of Tiger running shoes in the United States. He partnered up with Bill Bowerman , a nationally respected track and field coach at the University of Oregon who had been researching ways to give his athletes a competitive advantage. In 1971 the name Nike was used on the new line of sneakers (History 7 Heritage). 25 years ago started providing better shoes for competitive athletes with the motto of “All it will take is a passion for sports, a few good ideas and the will to make it happen” (2010, Peter &amp; Olson, p. 97).
Discussion Questions
There are two market segments of consumers; one that uses the sneakers for athletic activity and the other for casual wear. Consumers with strong goals to achieve athletic excellence would rely on their knowledge of the footwear as well as recall athletes that wear the footwear in both advertisements as well as in actual sporting events....

...﻿Nike - Market Segmentation
Nike has been around for quite a while now actually dating all the way back to 1964 when it was one known ass "Blue Ribbon Sports". Nike's initial target market started out as a side gig for Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman as they went around college to college selling running shoes to local track runners with their unique waffle iron design which was initially done by Bill Bowerman which he used to make with his wife's waffle iron. In time Nike sprung in to a much more bigger developing shoes for all sorts of sports from baseball to tennis, basketball, soccer, and even golf. Nike understood they had to tackle all sports to be the dominant brand in athletic sportswear which Nike has well done so. Nike's big sport by all means has to be basketball which ever way you look it its where Nike builds its popularity although they do gain some credit for tennis and running but basketball by all means is Nike's key sport.
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Ch. 7 - Business Marketing
Nike Business Marketing 101
Nikestore.com is a major asset to Nike's portion of sales anything Nike you are interested in
Nikestore.com has got you covered from the everyday walking or running shoe right down to the on field cleats. This of course not limiting itself to our everyday t-shirts, comfy pants, or just a plain old pair of socks. Now of course ill mention is where...